Vegan diets best for good heart health, according to new study

Rosie Batsford, News Editor, assesses how a plant-based diet could lower cholesterol and prevent arteries being blocked

AMAJOR study conducted by researchers at Københavns Universitet in Denmark has found that vegan and vegetarian diets are associated with better cardiac health than their meat-eating counterparts due to decreased levels of lipoproteins in the blood. Excessive lipoprotein levels are associated with an increased risk of heart disease, which kills approximately 18 million people annually, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Researchers looked at 30 studies conducted between 1982 and 2022, considering the diets and cardiac health of 2,372 patients overall — the most extensive study of its kind. It was concluded that plant-based diets allevi- ated significant heart disease risk blood markers, reducing overall cholesterol levels by 7 per cent, LVL (‘bad’) cholesterol by 10 per cent, and levels of Apolipoprotein B — a protein associated with LDL cholesterol uptake — by 14 per cent. This was broadly found to be the case across a range of participants of different ages, BMIs, states of health, and continents. Leader of the study, Professor Ruth Frikke-Schmidt, stressed the importance of this in an interview with BBC News, saying that the findings “correspond to a third of the effect of taking cholesterol-lowering medication such as statins.” She also stresses the importance of maintaining this lifestyle: “If someone were to main- tain a plant-based diet for five years, this would result in a seven percent reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease.” She estimates that if someone were to maintain a plant-based diet for 15 years, their risk of developing cardiac disease could reduce by 20 per cent. While statin treatment is certainly more effective than adopting a plant-based diet, the findings of this study remain significant. FrikkeSchmidt suggests that “combining statins with plant-based diets is likely to have a synergistic effect resulting in an even larger benefit;” patients at high risk of developing cardiovascular diseases should not substitute their medications for plant-based diets.

Ovarian

Daisy Scott discusses the causes of ovarian cancer and a tool that can help diagnose the early stages of the disease

ATOOL based on seven chemicals found in uterine fluids has been shown to outperform the leading tool for diagnosing earlystage ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is a disease which is usually spotted later on and is frequently deadly.

Ovarian cancer causes high mortality in women because of ineffective biomarkers for early diagnosis with over 300,000 new cases every year in the world. As the most common type of the cancer, epithelial ovarian cancer accounts for 90 per cent of ovarian cancers. However, most patients with epithelial ovarian cancers are diagnosed at an advanced stage, resulting in less than 30 per cent survival rate five-years after diagnosis. The delayed diagnosis of ovarian cancer is usually attributed to the oculate initiation of tumour formation and the absence of effective early-detection methods.

Therefore, advancing early detection of ovarian cancer is no doubt valuable for improving patient’s prognosis and expanding their lifetime.

The current test to diagnose ovarian cancer is a blood test for a protein called CA125 but this doesn’t detect the disease reliably. A population screening programme trialled in more than 200,000 women in the UK failed to significantly reduce the number of deaths from ovarian cancer. It has severe limitations in both sensitivity and specificity.

Pan Wang at Peking University in China and his colleagues aimed to develop a better test by collecting uterine fluid from 219 women with cancer. The uterine fluid contains cells and metabolic products that come from the ovaries and fallopian tubes. Using mass spectrometers, the researchers examined the fluid of 96 women to look for metabolites whose levels were markedly distinct for those with early-stage ovarian cancer. From this, they identified a group of seven metabolites, including amino acids tyrosine and phenylalanine which could be used for diagnosis.

After this, they tested the fluids from the remaining 123 women for these seven metabolites and carried out the CA125 test on them. The new test performed significantly better than the CA125 test in diagnosing ovarian cancer at the earlier stage. There is increasing evidence that most ovarian cancers have originated from the fallopian tubes, having an anatomical connection with the uterine cavity, uterine fluid would be a better option to detect any abnormal changes during ovarian cancer initiation. Therefore, the work from this paper not only characterises metabolic profiles of uterine fluid in different patients but also provides an accurate and sensitive strategy for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer. it is still at an early stage. I would like to see this profile validated in a larger prospective data set, but this initial report shows much promise.”

Eric Eisenhauer at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has said:

“The results are promising, but the tests need to be validated in a larger group of people. Most currently available tests for early detection have difficulty identifying ovarian cancer while

However, there are some limitations associated with this study. Mainly, the study did not include healthy women in the control group due to challenges in obtaining uterine fluid. To alleviate this limitation, they harvest samples from women with benign gynaecological conditions as the comparison group. Sujata Rawat from the Adesh Hospital in Bathinda in India points out that the study didn’t include people without cancer as a comparison, and there may be other conditions that change the profile of metabolites in similar ways. More studies and research on a bigger group needs to be carried out before the findings of this study can be further confirmed.